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HR entrepreneur Mike Coffey, SPHR, SHRM-SCP engages business thought leaders about the strategic, psychological, legal, and practical implications of bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. As an HR consultant, mentor to first-stage businesses through EO’s Accelerator program, and owner of Imperative—Bulletproof Background Screening, Mike is passionate about helping other professionals improve how they recruit, select, and manage their people. Most thirty-minute episodes of Good Morning, HR will be eligible for half a recertification credit for both HRCI and SHRM-certified professionals. Mike is a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Fort Worth and active with the Texas Association of Business, the Fort Worth Chamber, and Texas SHRM.
Whatever the organization, whatever the role, like, as long as you understand what that meaning of work is and you can share that out ideally through to employee testimonials because they're trusted more, then you're sharing out your different value pillars in a way that is building your reputation for you.
Mike Coffey:Good morning, HR. I'm Mike Coffey, president of Imperative, premium background checks with fast and friendly service. And this is the podcast where I talk to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. Please follow rate and review good morning HR wherever you get your podcast. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok for the time being, and good morning hr.com.
Mike Coffey:As the competition for choice talent and not just warm bodies continues to rise, many companies are recognizing the need to burnish their reputation with potential employees by building an employer brand. They're also recognizing that the job seeker market isn't the only consumer for the employer's brand. It's also necessary to tell the company's story to the internal market, their current employees. And joining me today to discuss employer branding is Crystal Ley. Crystal is the chief brand officer and chief executive at GBS Worldwide, an end to end talent attraction firm specializing in employer branding, recruitment marketing, media management, and organizational talent transformation.
Mike Coffey:In addition to her more than 20 years of people leadership experience, Crystal has earned her masters in leadership and organizational innovation and is pursuing a master of science in organization and business psychology. Welcome to Good Morning HR, Crystal.
Crystal Lay:Thanks for having me, Mike. I feel like I I can die a happy person now. I have achieved all my dreams.
Mike Coffey:Here you are. So when we're talking about employer brand, that's more than a logo for my HR department. So what what is what is employer brand, you know, when we're talking about something that's actually effective and useful for the company?
Crystal Lay:Yeah. That's a great question. So, I mean, your employer brand is more or less your reputation as an employer, and it's co owned by an organization and the employees that work there, whether that's contract, perm, you know, full time, part time, doesn't really matter. Everybody that interacts from an employment perspective with your organization has some ownership, like it or not, over what that reputation looks like. Because we can't really own a reputation.
Crystal Lay:Right? Like, we are not the ones that get to own that. Right. Everybody else really sets your reputation based off of their perceptions of your behavior.
Mike Coffey:So everything from what employees tell their friends over dinner about their job to what they post on Glassdoor to whatever we as an organization happen to post on the Internet, whether it's our social media or our job postings. It's it's that whole range.
Crystal Lay:It's yes. The end to end. I mean, I used to left this is going back a few years now, but we used to talk about it in terms of that song, Jenny 8 675309, you know, stuff in the bathroom wall. Right? Like, all of that is reputation.
Crystal Lay:Now granted, that's Jenny's reputation. Different thing. But wherever you can put information about someone out into the world or an organization out into the world, like, it it impacts the overall reputation. And so employer brand is really saying, like, hey. There's a lot of different ways that we're perceived by the world as, you know, a service provider or consumer goods or whatever it is that we sell, whatever puts us in business, as a member of the community.
Crystal Lay:Right? Because every organization is part of a broader community. As an employer, employer brand is really just looking at that employment perspective. That's it.
Mike Coffey:So there are a lot of factors outside of an employer's direct control affecting their brand. And, you know, I mentioned Glassdoor and that that's, you know, the bane of existence for, you know, many employers and how your employees are gonna talk about you. So there's no if I feel like I've got a poor employer brand, if if we're not seen in the marketplace as a place that people necessarily want to work as an employer. I mean, that's that seems like a pretty steep hill to climb to change that. You know, certainly, I can say, oh, we're a great place and here's the proof of of why we're a great place to work.
Mike Coffey:But really changing that sounds like, you know, change in culture. I guess we all have an employer. It's like values. Every organization has values. And whether you wrote them down or not, you've got values.
Mike Coffey:You've got the behavior incentivizes. So I guess we all have an employer brand. Maybe we've not really recognized it or we've not tried to shape it, but how how do you go about doing that once we realize our our brand isn't exactly what we want, it's not attracting the kind of talent we want. Then how do we how do we go about changing it when it's so much of it seems outside of our immediate control?
Crystal Lay:You have such a wonderfully nuanced question there. There's a lot to unpack. So let's
Mike Coffey:That's my superpower. Ask one question and then let listen to an answer for 10 minutes. So Totally fine. You did
Crystal Lay:do you did well. Okay. So let's let's unpack this. So let's start with, yes, everybody has a reputation. Now the question is, did you did you intentionally try to craft and shape that?
Crystal Lay:Are you managing that reputation, or is it just completely organic and and managed for you? Right? And that's the difference. So when you recognize that, hey. What's being managed for me or maybe even what we've crafted isn't yielding the results we need, then, yes, it's time to stop and and start to unpack where you are.
Crystal Lay:Look at what's creating the dissonance between who you think you are and what your reputation says you are and and create some strategies to fix that. Now to do that is a multidiscipline exercise. Right? It's a little bit of org psych. It's a little bit of HR and and culture and change management.
Crystal Lay:Right? It's a little bit of marketing. It's a lot of recruiting. So there's a lot of different pieces to this. So I get asked a lot, like, who should own employer brand?
Crystal Lay:And the answer is, like, everyone and no one. Right? I mean, the reality is it's not something that can be truly owned by just one person or department. You can have a shepherd for your employer brand. Right?
Crystal Lay:And so rather than looking at it as a tight ownership because marketing tends to go in and go like me, and HR goes me, and then they fight. So rather than looking at it as ownership, perhaps the steward should be where the biggest part of the problem is. And that may shift from time or, like, over time. Right? So initially, if the if the problem that's driving that is a massive PR, you know, issue.
Crystal Lay:And I and I often see this when there's, like, workplace accidents where somebody may have lost life and limb or, you know, somebody gets nailed an organization gets nailed because the products they were selling maybe aren't so great for the public or there was some sort of scandal. Like, that's a PR problem that can impact employment, but probably should be managed by marketing because PR is going to shape a lot of those solutions. All of my TA people are hating me at this exact moment, I'm just gonna say. But that doesn't mean they need to own it forever because at some point, it's going to shift back to being a talent attraction and retention issue that's going to be best shepherded by HR, talent attraction, you know, TAA recruiting, however that's up in your org. Wherever it wherever it lands as far as who's gonna shepherd it, the first thing you really need to do is understand the of of that reputation.
Crystal Lay:And usually, not always, but usually, it starts with, we don't understand who we really are. We know what we sell. We know the kind of jobs we offer. We know more or less what we think the employment experience is, but we don't necessarily understand our value. And this is where 20, 30 years ago, we had a massive disservice done to us in the industry because some very, very bright marketing consultants said, oh, we can expand our portfolio of of services to companies by creating this shiny EVP that's really a marketing exercise as opposed to something that's gonna drive business revenue, which is an org psych exercise.
Mike Coffey:And time out. By EVP, you mean employee value proposition. Right?
Crystal Lay:Employer value proposition. Yep. We can settle that one, by the way, because that is a constant debate. Is it employer value proposition or employee value proposition? The answer is for employer brand, it's employer value proposition.
Crystal Lay:The value proposition is the what are you offering to someone else, the what's in it for me of your audience. Right? So the employee is not going to give you the what's in it for me for themselves.
Mike Coffey:They're not delivering the value. I'm telling them this is what our value is as an organization. Right.
Crystal Lay:Or this is the belief of what our value is. Right? This is the this is the, ideally, it would be this is the, my brain just broke. This is the shared understanding of our value between the organization and the workforce. Right?
Crystal Lay:Ideally, you want that to be shared, and that's really important. What we're talking about there is person environment fit or alignment. Both both exist. So that's an organizational psychology construct. And and the the thought behind PE fit, person environment fit, is that before someone comes to work for you, and even really after they work for you, they don't truly care about organizational values.
Crystal Lay:They care about their values, particularly before they come to work for you because they're not bought into your your Kool Aid yet. So so you wanna be able to speak to their individual values. Why is that important? Because in the environment, if you're not able to help them live out their own personal values, like, if they're not able to experience the fulfillment of those values in your environment, they will never self actualize and become sticky into your environment. Right?
Crystal Lay:So that's gonna impact your attrition, your attention, and your productivity and engagement. Right? Productivity and engagement is what makes you money. So we want to be able to attract the people who are going to be able to live their values out in our work environment. When we have that alignment and we have that harmony, EVP and subsequent employer brand moves from a, hey.
Crystal Lay:Maybe we can bump this needle up on our revenue about 5% to about a 28% change. Right? Fully actualized. So you're talking about a 3 year program there. But, it's it's a whole thing, and there's a lot of research and study and and true academic statistics around this that'll be able to show you, like, yes, this is achievable.
Crystal Lay:Most agencies don't build that way. Right? So most organizations don't have that. Right? Or if they do, they kind of fell into it.
Crystal Lay:Right? Typically, the way that it gets built, yeah, is, a bunch of people sit around a table and say, this is what we're comfortable with, and this is what we think our people are. This is what we think they'll do.
Mike Coffey:Or this is what we aspire to be. This is who you know? And I don't wanna own a company that's like what we really are. I wanna own a company that's all shiny on a you know, I'm not on a you know?
Crystal Lay:Yeah. And that's such a disservice to the organization and the people in it. Why? Because there this is gonna be controversial. There are no bad cultures.
Crystal Lay:There are bad representations of cultures. Now there are bad fits in cultures that create toxic environments because everybody's misaligned. Right? But the organization in and of itself, there's there are people that will be attracted to almost everything. Now let's take out the extremes because I could hear the people in the background going, what about the sweatshops?
Crystal Lay:What about the people that, like, have people sleep in their car or pee in bottles while they're working? Yeah. Okay. That's bad. That's always gonna be bad.
Crystal Lay:But that's also, like, a fraction of a percentage of the overall workforce. Most environments aren't good or bad. They're just environments, and you either get alignment, which creates this lovely synergy around your employees. They're bought into what you're doing. They're excited to be there, assuming your pay and all of those things are what they should be.
Crystal Lay:Right? And, and you have a good brand outside of that. Right? Because they're happy to be there. As much as anyone is happy to work for 2 thirds of their working day, they're happy to be part of that organization, and it reflects.
Crystal Lay:When it's misaligned, you hear people talking about that misalignment and the grumpy. Why? Because we are 9 times more likely as human beings to talk about that which we are dissatisfied with than that which we are satisfied with. So that's kind of I I don't know. I'm rambling a little bit, but that's more or less the essence of it.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And I've seen that, like, I really like what you said about no bad culture with the exception of, you know, the boss who sexually harasses his people and and we all live with it, all those things that we know are just bad behavior. But how many times have we seen someone say that's a toxic culture there. I hate, you know, and blah blah blah, And you realize, well, no. It's a very competitive culture.
Mike Coffey:It's a sales oriented culture. It's a winner take all culture, but that's what they reward and that's where they thrive. And that's not necessarily bad, but maybe you were just a bad fit. That was a toxic culture for you. And, like, just, you know, you know, a 100 feet under the ocean water is a great culture for the fish.
Mike Coffey:It's a horrible culture for me. You know, I don't wanna spend too much time there. And so I think that's a really good point that, you know, certainly, there are cultures that are just, you know, but somebody talks you know, they talk about the the tech culture or, you know, working at what well, you know, named the named the big company. Oh, it was horrible. It's to you know, this company was awful to work for, but it's not for the people who stay and for most of the people who who really are successful there.
Mike Coffey:And so then what they're trying to do, I guess, through their employer brand is figure out how to attract more people who wanna work in this culture and then strongly dissuade from even applying those people who don't fit our culture.
Crystal Lay:Right. And so now let's get back into employer brand. So once you build out your EVP, the next thing you do is you build out an identity framework. Right? And so that's gonna be one of the how are we going to present this this now our understanding of our our our person environment fit?
Crystal Lay:How do we present that to the world? What's the messaging frameworks we're gonna use? What are the visual expressions of that that we need to put out into the world? We know how do we show all of the different functions and experiences and value pillars that we now know we have the ability to allow our people not allow, but our people are able to live out in the organization. And so part of that is creating what's called hooks and counter hooks in our messaging.
Crystal Lay:Right? So hooks are the things that are going to draw in the people that you're trying to attract. The people that are going to excel within your environment. Right? Because they're aligned.
Crystal Lay:And then counter hooks are things that are intended to repel the people that are not likely to be able to to thrive within your environment. A good book on this, like, for if you're just starting out and you haven't read anything about employer brand or maybe you don't know very much about it, but you wanna understand the basic ideas of hooks and counter hooks would actually be, Brian Adams and Charlotte Adams. I I don't think she used her married name there. I don't remember what her maiden name was. Give and Get is the name of the the book.
Crystal Lay:It is definitely a beginner book. Right? So, like, this is you're not gonna take this, read this, and then be like, I'm master of the brand. Not not what does it sometimes do. But it will help you have really great great conversations with TA, with marketing, with your agency, and kinda help you understand, like, this is the process that we need to go through.
Crystal Lay:Now, Brian and I have different philosophies on how you construct EBP. It doesn't make him right. It doesn't make me wrong. It doesn't make me right. It doesn't make him wrong.
Crystal Lay:I just focus on the org psych piece of it, the org development piece of it. He focuses more on the marketing piece. So as you read through that, you'll see a difference in some of what I'm talking about versus how they build. That's okay.
Mike Coffey:So Brian Adams, give and get, and we will put that in the show notes. I will trust Mary Anne Hernandez, my amazing marketing coordinator, find that on Amazon and include the link. So it'll be there in the notes, guys.
Crystal Lay:They will love that. So, so that's a good thing to do. So let's back to hooks and counter hooks. So they talk about that. That's the attraction repel piece.
Crystal Lay:When we're looking at counter hooks, like, I don't need to say, you won't do here it well, here if you don't have. Right? I don't need to do that. What I need to do is say things like for example, one organization that we work work with is, like, every day is kind of like a friendly competition. I am constantly trying to outdo the people around me while knowing they're going to support me as I get my wins, and I'm gonna support them as they get theirs.
Crystal Lay:I've said a lot from a value per set perspective in just those few sentences. What I've said is this is a competitive environment. It's probably high performance oriented. They are probably constantly hustling. They compete with each other, but they also have some teamwork and cohesion.
Crystal Lay:Right? They can celebrate those wins together. So that'll feel attractive. That last part will feel attractive for most people. But for people who are introverted, people who are uncomfortable with, high performance environments or competition, people who don't necessarily wanna look at the leaderboard and see where they rank amongst their peers, I've sent out some messaging there that will repel them from applying without ever saying don't apply if, or you must have.
Crystal Lay:Right? The the idea behind a good employer brand is hand over heart, not fist in the air or finger in the air. You know? Like, it's it's always hand over heart. So we wanna try to inspire more than we want to direct, if that makes sense.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And and that's interesting because, like, for our background screening side of the company, I am hiring the exact opposite of me. I'm hiring the introvert. You just said you don't wouldn't want in that exam. And so our, we've we talk about working as one with compassion and respect.
Mike Coffey:I'm looking for people who who are not, you know, who don't need a high level of ambiguity. They don't need to solve problems. They need to be able to put tab a and slot a repeatedly over and over with a high level of accuracy and precision. Mhmm. And so we talk about, you know, those kind of things in the row.
Mike Coffey:And then in our application process, we emulate that that environment. So it's real detail oriented. So if an employee if an applicant bails after, you know, because it's it's just too tedious to go through some basic questions. Like, if somebody who's a high salesperson, you know, who's, you know, very quick and wants to talk about themselves and move on. They're gonna, you know, somebody with that or somebody like me.
Mike Coffey:I would never fight through that process, but we found that when the applicants who come through and demonstrate the competencies that we need and have the behaviors, we we can attract those folks, and they work almost I could almost hire them by the time we've been our competency assessments, and they've been through our employment application process. It's I could hire them without an interview almost. It's it's it's it's so good. And so and we see them self select out. You know, when when somebody gets to that, you know, we're asking, you know, detailed questions about what they learned about in their previous jobs or, you know, tell me, you know, about a time, and we're just giving them opportunity.
Mike Coffey:I don't really care often what their answers are. I just wanna see that they're taking the time to to try to put a response together. And when they bail out, it's I'm dancing a jig because that was a good thing, and, then the ones who fight through have turned out to be our best employees.
Crystal Lay:So so a lot of what you're talking about there are the values of structure and role related responsibility. And we do see that people I mean, everyone needs that to some degree. Right? So if to some degree, we all need it. Now how much we value it is gonna change a lot from the the ocean perspective, like where you fall on the, ocean scale of personality.
Crystal Lay:But that being said, some some things that I heard in in what you're saying, like, for for your organization, I would look for and I would bet your EVP, assessment would bear out, you know, role related responsibilities, structure, stability are probably gonna be pretty high.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Crystal Lay:And then maybe, cohesiveness or unity as it relates to team.
Mike Coffey:Sociability is very low. You know, I know we tell them, here's what your day looks like. You're gonna be sitting in front of 2 or 3 computer monitors all day long, you know, doing a lot of data entry, moving data from one source to our report management system, putting things in natural English in a, you know, in a concise but, you know, more more verbose than copy and paste format and just, you know, kind of describing. And, again, trying to, you know, it's as much trying to dissuade the people who wouldn't be good candidates that as attract the ones who who are the perfect fit.
Crystal Lay:Yeah. And so, like, some of the some of the hooks that you might say there is, like, you will always know what your day looks like. Mhmm. It's easy to be able to be part of a routine and part of a team that's stable and does the same thing day after day after day. And for some people, that will feel like a warm hug.
Crystal Lay:And for other people, it will feel like you just dropped them in a vat of hot meal. Right? And so yeah. So so depending on whether or not they fit the environment for even that function or role because, again, when we look at an organization, it takes a lot of different types to be able to make everything work. And so you'll need some level of salespeople who are like, oh my god.
Crystal Lay:Please. No. No. No. No.
Crystal Lay:No. Right? So that's a sub a sub brand or a sub EVP to your overarching. Right? So you have functional EVPs and functional employer brand messaging to be able to account for those variances in in function.
Crystal Lay:But when you're taking your application process and making that part of your, like, assessment of do you fit in our culture, the one thing that I would note for most organizations, make sure you're disclosing that. Like, hey, you may not realize it, but you're about to experience what it's like to work here just in filling out this application. Why is that important? So for someone who's neurodivergent, as an example, I think it's important for a lot of people. But for people who are neurodivergent, they really need to understand the whys.
Crystal Lay:Not every neurodivergent diagnosis I'm making in generalization, but a lot of them need to understand why am I doing this? For someone with attention deficit disorder who may actually be really good at your job, but still have ADHD. You know, if you're asking for a lot of investment upfront and it's not reciprocal investment, because it sounds like you're asking for a lot of investment before you give them something back. Right? So they need to understand that why or they won't see the point of of putting that time in.
Crystal Lay:Right? For someone with autism, where paranoia is at times a facet of that diagnosis, for some people, again, autism is a spectrum. So let me put that disclaimer up front. Not everybody's gonna have this issue. But for people who do maybe have some slight paranoia through there, they may not understand.
Crystal Lay:It may it may feel invasive to have to ask answer all of these questions, particularly before they've talked to someone to understand the that the ask. So a lot of them, which is not to say that your, your system or process is bad, and you may you may actually do that. But a lot of companies will hide little pieces of their I say hide because it's just not disclosed. Little pieces of their, process into the upfront parts of talent attraction without any kind of disclosure to it, without any kind of explanation to it. And then they're shocked when people are really turned off by their brand.
Crystal Lay:It's like, well, you didn't manage that part of your brand. Right. You just kinda did something that had a with them for you, but not explaining what was in it for them. And there was something in it for them. So had you said, hey.
Crystal Lay:We're gonna go ahead and get started with this whole recruitment process right now. Your first assessment is actually part of your application process, or we want you to go solve this riddle, which was in vogue, like, 2 years ago, to to be able to get to our application, and it'll show us a, b, and c. They probably would have done that. There would have been a much better brand perception. It would have increased the candidate experience.
Crystal Lay:Right? They they would have had more brand fans come out of that as opposed to what is this, right, which will increase the ghost rate. And it'll ultimately decrease the overall reputation. So those are the things that you wanna work on when you're building out your employer brand strategy. Do I need to test out their alignment to EVP pillars?
Crystal Lay:And what are the different ways that I can do that before I actually bring them in for an interview. There's several different ways. Some of it is just like the natural attraction repelling in your messaging. You can build in all kinds of different little interactions through your recruitment process. I personally like having, depending on the organization, If an organization wants to be able to start embedding them into their culture prior to even really getting them into the full recruitment process, having them interact with social channels can be a a way to do that.
Crystal Lay:Building out a community, I've built 100 of those over the years where we even put candidates into communities to be able to interact with, with different people. Now building a community at this point in this stage of the game with all of the different social platforms, building your own community may not necessarily be necessary. You could build a subreddit, right, where you're talking about the benefits of background checks, Mike. You know? Or, you know, where you're talking with candidates about, like, how to be able to solve, coding language, natural linguistics issue, like, that kind of thing.
Crystal Lay:Find something that's relevant to the topical matter of of what you're recruiting for. You know, we have a client that works in real estate. So having an investment real estate forum where people can talk about just investment real estate with each other can be great. And then encouraging candidates to go there and get involved with that conversation, and they can see, okay, how good they are are they at, interacting with people they don't know? Are they able to be proactive in making those kind of contacts?
Crystal Lay:Like, there's things that they can assess there without actually ever making it part of the application. Conversely, candidates are able to assess how comfortable am I with this kind of thing. If the organization says, hey. This is really how we market and how you're gonna get leads and how you're gonna be able to close things out. Don't get in there and start having some of these conversations and feel how comfortable that is or not to you.
Crystal Lay:If you like it, go apply. Right? Then they can look at it and say, yeah, that works for me or no, it really doesn't. And it's not a formal assessment, it's just an opportunity. They can apply either way.
Crystal Lay:Right?
Mike Coffey:And let's take a quick break. Good morning HR is brought to you by imperative, bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. For 25 years Imperative has helped risk averse clients make well informed decisions about the people they involve in their business. Whether that means very thorough pre employment background checks, due diligence for family offices or private equity firms, or any other kind of business due diligence, if there are people involved, there's risk involved. We help businesses mitigate that risk.
Mike Coffey:You can learn more at imperativeinfo. Com. If you're an HRCI or SHRM certified professional, this episode of Good Morning HR has been pre approved for 1 half hour of recertification credit. To obtain the recertification information visit goodmorninghr.com and click on research credits, then select episode 142 and enter the keyword brand, that's brand. And if you're looking for even more recertification credit, check out the webinars page at imperativeinfo dotcom.
Mike Coffey:And now back to my conversation with Chrystal Leigh. So owning that that conversation space whether it's a subreddit that, you know, that you're an admin on or a Facebook group or wherever your people are, wherever you're funny, That seems like it'd be really practical for a larger employer with critical mass as far as audience and employee population. If you're a small to medium sized business, what is there value from just paying attention and participating in the evil HR lady Facebook group with or any of those other things, and just being active there, and, you know, talking about your issues and responding to issues that employees may be having in other organizations?
Crystal Lay:Sure. I think there's value in knowledge wherever we can get it. Right? And so, one really important thing to note is that if you use anything as an assessment that's not part of your application process, you have to disclose that, and it it leads to some murky stuff. So to me, the the value of the community and those kind of things, like, yes, you can get some insights that you can then talk to them about once they apply.
Crystal Lay:But it should not be a screen in or screen out tool. It's really the idea of it is to help when we're talking about brand, it's to help people understand your brand and to help you get some insight into conversation that you can have to see how aligned they are into your organization or not. So do you need to own it? No. You don't.
Crystal Lay:I think the more populated the, personally, and this is a personal preference. It's totally subjective. The more populated the community, the better off you're going to be because the more varied the conversation. There are times where that doesn't work. Defense contractors, for example, or people that are formulating drugs.
Crystal Lay:You know? I'll throw out, you know, Eli Lilly as an example. I would never say, oh, Eli Lilly, go put your formulations online, and they would never do it. Right? But you could absolutely tie back to a scientific community for chemists where they talk about spending their entire career working on one part of one formula.
Crystal Lay:Right? They may never see their drug go to market. And and what does that feel like to know that you're part of a body of work that's going to extend beyond your career? Right? So that's a way that you can have some of those conversations without actually getting into assessments.
Crystal Lay:But the bottom line is however you do it, whatever you do, you wanna make sure the point of it is they get to experience facets of your culture, facets of what it's going to be like in your work environment to see how the alignment is for them. They get to judge just as much as you do.
Mike Coffey:So we talked a little bit about the the gap, you know, who who owns this employer branding? Is it marketing and sales, or is it HR, or, you know, does it you know, we volley back and forth. But that employer brand, you know, just so it doesn't create dissonance needs to somewhat align right with the corporate, you know, the bigger sales brand of the organization. I would think there's need to be some alignment there. I mean, if we're if we're saying if we're if all our marketing is saying for our customer base, people who spend money on us, that, you know, we're, you know, we're bringing peace to the world and, you know, kumbaya and all of that.
Mike Coffey:And then our marketing is our to our into the prospective employee population is, you know, we're cutthroat, we're, you know, very highly competitive. Do those need to be integrated, or or does it not create a dissonance in in the in the environment outside the organization?
Crystal Lay:So I'm not gonna say that customers don't ever look at your employment marketing because some do. Most don't. I mean, we have literally, as human beings, we have an attention span that is super short. So most of us spend our days going through what do we need to make it through our day for us. Right?
Crystal Lay:There are people that will will do that kind of research. They're massively in the minority. Does that mean you shouldn't care for it all? No. Probably not.
Crystal Lay:But
Mike Coffey:But what about on the employee side?
Crystal Lay:Well, on the employee side, oh, yeah. They look at both, but most people understand marketing. Right? I mean, understand the fact I don't. Let me step that back.
Crystal Lay:I'm a walk back that sentence just a little bit. Most people understand that when you're marketing a product or service, you are marketing a product or service. Right? That's why brands tend to have less authority and trust, rating than an employee. That's why sites like Glassdoor matter.
Crystal Lay:You know, in her site, The Muse, all of these places where you're able to get third party reviews, like, the reason they work and the reason that they're successful is because we trust people more than brands. Right? And why? Because we know brands are marketing. You know, marketers be marketing.
Crystal Lay:That's their job. So is it okay if there's dissonance between the 2? Sure. Because they're completely different experiences. If if a company is worried about that, you know, like, to use your example, like, as you were talking, I yeah.
Crystal Lay:I would stick up a landing and and, like, a almost an interstitial page that popped up between the company side to the talent side that says, how do we find peace through war?
Mike Coffey:Oh. No.
Crystal Lay:I don't know. That would actually
Mike Coffey:make Yeah. Yeah.
Crystal Lay:Moment itself look like a war zone. But you know what I mean? Like,
Mike Coffey:It's hard work. We it's a real hard grind and, to, you know, achieve
Crystal Lay:and sacrifice and sometimes going to war. Right? Like, again
Mike Coffey:Yeah. No.
Crystal Lay:I agree. Ever equate my employment to war. But Right. Unless maybe you're a defense contractor then.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. There you go. Yeah.
Crystal Lay:But the point is, like, there can be dissonance. You just have to explain the dissonance. Right? So, if my if my brand is all butterflies and sunshine, to get butterflies and sunshine, I have to build an ecosystem where they can thrive. So just explain the dissonance between there.
Crystal Lay:Right? So that's doable. In every environment, that's doable. And we've worked with some brands where it was like, oh my god. What do you how do we explain this?
Crystal Lay:The reality is you don't have to come up with a complicated explanation. Your team knows why. Right? So when part of doing that EVP research, part of the reason that it is so important to invest in a solid EVP is to understand why there might be dissonance between your corporate values and your employment values. And chances are part of that is because your experience, your customer experience is very different than your work experience.
Crystal Lay:Right? That's okay. We just need to understand it. And if we understand what that dissonance is, then we can we can explain it. And we can then explain it in a way that's not explaining it away.
Crystal Lay:It's just explaining this is the reality and here's the benefit of being part of that reality. And now we get into meaning of work. Right? So we understand this is why it is. And when you when you come into this this room with us, when you come into this experience with us, here's what you get out of it.
Crystal Lay:Like, the work we do impacts the broader world or customers or whatever this way. And our employees feel a sense of pride, fulfillment, excitement, whatever, depending on the organization because they're part of making whatever that is happen to the world. So, for example, we worked with a manufacturer who does a lot of food, formulations. And so for their people, like, they couldn't talk about the brands that they were working with because the the company itself was the behind the scenes partner.
Mike Coffey:They were the white label. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Crystal Lay:Right. Right. They were the formulators. And so, so they couldn't say, like, oh, I'm part of, you know, this restaurant or this Like, we're part of what makes sure that people are not just fed, but they have experiences while they eat. And that feels really good.
Crystal Lay:Right? So whatever it is, and this is true for every position and organization across the world. You know, I've had janitors talk to me and talk about how, like, I know if I'm out of work for 3 days, no one comes to the office because it stinks. I enable work. Like, that's awesome, and you understand the meaning of work.
Crystal Lay:This is great. Like, that's the meaning of your job, and it has real meaning. Like, yep. CEO will not show up nor will anyone else if the play stinks. Okay.
Crystal Lay:Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So whatever the organization, whatever the role, like, as long as you understand what that meaning of work is and you can share that out ideally through to employee testimonials because they're trusted more, then you're sharing out your different value pillars in a way that is building your reputation for you.
Mike Coffey:Perfect. Well, that, there's so much to talk about. You talk you touched on your your I know you've done a lot of research around neurodiversity. You touched on that. I wanna get you back just to talk about that issue.
Mike Coffey:That's one that's near and dear, and, we we just had David Aspinall from Audicon on not long ago, and I really wanna do a deeper dive on that. I'd love to talk about some of the employee retention sides of employer branding and and those things and getting those aligned, but that's all the time we have right now. So thank you for joining me today, Crystal.
Crystal Lay:Oh, thank you. And I'll come back anytime.
Mike Coffey:Thank you. And thank you for listening. You can comment on this episode or search our previous episodes at goodmorninghr.com or on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. And don't forget to follow us wherever you get your podcast. Rob Upchurch is our technical producer, and you can reach him at robmakespods.com.
Mike Coffey:And thank you to Imperative's marketing coordinator, Mary Anne Hernandez, who keeps the trains running on time. And I'm Mike Coffey. As always, don't hesitate to reach out if I can be of service to you personally or professionally. I'll see you next week, and until then, be well, do good, and keep your chin up.